Sunday, March 2, 2014

Humanity 4.0 and Thrivability

The Quest

What if every organization were
guided by the question: how can our actions best contribute to life’s
ability to thrive at every level – for employees, for the organization,
for customers, for community, for the biosphere? What if our guidance
in this intention came from the ways life itself operates, in all its
effortless creativity, order and resilience? What if this were, in
fact, a better path to productivity, competitive advantage and success?
And what if, along the way, each of us could feel a meaningful sense of
connection and contribution to the whole of life?

Our goal would be not only profitability and not only sustainability – but thrivability.

As it stands, this is not the explicit
intention and modus operandi of organizations today, or for the past
hundred years. Instead, organizational DNA is programmed to create
something less than life thriving. After decades of operating from this
pattern, life is in the balance. My life. Your life. All life on
Earth. (OK, the cockroaches will probably be OK no matter what, but
that’s not very reassuring.)

The good news is that, around the world,
there are examples of positive mutations to organizational DNA.
Companies operating from an altered pattern, with promising results.
Even better, there are masses of people hungry to know about and
propagate these mutations.

What’s needed is some means of charting this emergent DNA pattern so that others can replicate not best practices but best principles.
This is the full mission of the Thrivable World Quest. In over a
decade of research and client work, we have identified ten fertile
conditions that organizations must cultivate for life to thrive. These
will be the themes we will explore. They will be our treasure map. The
quest is to add multiple perspectives and stories to make the map fully
robust and to help the pattern spread.

Positive mutations. A core map of the
mutation pattern. Masses of people eager to integrate that pattern into
their own organizations. If we put all of these things together in a
way that embodies the grand collaboration, playfulness and engagement
needed, we might just figure out how to have every business on Earth be
fully in service of life on the planet.

Let’s start designing organizations as
if life were precious. As if the viability of our species depended on
it. As if life’s infinite wisdom were readily available to us. It’s
time to calmly, creatively, and joyfully regenerate, renew, repair, and
reverse some of the disastrous trends on our planet and nurture new
organizational mutations that help us to do that.

Thrivability

Thrivability
is a growing global movement, with passionate champions around the
world. We define it as the intention and practice of aligning
organizations with how living systems thrive and how people thrive.
It’s the recognition that organizations work the same way living systems
do – living systems like our bodies, rain forests and coral reefs –
because they are
living systems. And when we bring what we know about thriving living
systems to our organizations, we get amazing results. Results like
joyful and effective collaboration, inspired innovation, shared
learning, adaptability to changing circumstances, and just plain getting stuff done.
The more you understand about how life thrives – and the more you align
your organization with those patterns and tendencies – the more of
these results you can expect to see. Most importantly, your
organization will be inherently in harmony with life, aiding its own
sustainability and contributing to life’s ability to thrive on the
planet.

How does thrivability work?

In practice, thrivability is about identifying and committing to your
organization’s own best means of enhancing life’s ability to thrive.
And it’s about aligning with life’s core operating patterns across
every aspect of the organization. In many cases, this involves familiar
strategies and tactics, but it also calls for new approaches of
participation, playfulness and flow. The bottom line is that when
people understand that their organization is in meaningful service of
life and when the way they work feels vibrantly alive and effective,
it’s a powerful formula.

Why is thrivability important?

Understanding how life works – and how to support that pattern in our organizations
– opens up tremendous new possibilities not only for organizations, but
also for society and for the future of life on the planet.

The dominant guiding story about organizations continues to depict
them as machines, separate from people and nature. Our belief is that
the limitations of this story are at the root of most – if not all – of
society’s problems, and that our failure to recognize the life in our
organizations is intricately linked to our decreasing ability to sustain life on the planet.

Though organizations do have mechanistic characteristics, there is
also life within them. And it’s their aliveness that enables
compassion, creativity, collaboration, collective intelligence and
resilience to emerge.

For this reason, thrivability is ultimately a rally cry to set our
sights beyond profitability, corporate responsibility, and even
sustainability to the larger goal of “enabling life to thrive.” After
all, you get what you aim for. And how you aim for it also affects the
outcome.